Going Up

"Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say."

KiKi has that line tattooed in big letters in the middle of her back. There are other smaller quotes from rebel leaders and writers all over her muscled body. I would ask her why that one is so big, but it is already awkward that I am naked with her. I'm suddenly aware that my newbie status must be as clear as my uninked flabby white skin. We are in a decontamination chamber being sprayed with god knows what before our journey up.

I keep my mouth shut about the tattoo. This is my first trip up as a Downer. Kiki has been helping me so far, even though she doesn't need to. I don't want to snarf that up. We walk into the next room where we find our clothes and gear, smelling of the same offal that they sprayed on us. Welcome to the working class, I think.

When Kiki is back in her kit not a single tattoo is visible. My own kit is baggy and doesn't sit right anywhere. Hers looks like it was made for her specifically and is flawless. And her boots make her at least three inches taller than me. Somehow my new shirt already has a stain on it. We grab our packs and walk down the tunnel to the pods.

Our pod is a two-seater. We stow our gear behind the seats and start to strap in. I've never been up in anything less than a twenty-seater. And those have a minibar and a bathroom. This is nothing like that. This one is small and so dirty that I start to wonder why we went through the process of decontamination.

"What if I have to go to the bathroom?"

Kiki points back down the tunnel. "Better go now, little prince."

She has been calling me some variation of royalty all day. I think it might be a sign of friendship, given how patient she has been with all my questions. I don't mind the prince part. I deserve it. My family are all Risers. We have never had to work with our hands. But the little part gets me. My guess is we are about the same age and if anything, I'm a little taller than she is, without the boots.

When I get back to the pod, I see that Kiki has pulled a thick blanket out of her pack, even though the temperature is over a hundred and I'm sweating buckets. I can't remember the last time I was cold enough to use a blanket.

"These worker pods don't have much for insulation and starting about two miles up it starts to get cold. Don't worry, I can share." She gives me a sly smile.

I strap in and Kiki reaches for the remote controls. Our pod disengages from the dock and she drives it over to the queue. We are about 20 pods back, but the line is moving. Soon we are clamped onto the up cable. Compared to the cables I'm used to, this one is smaller, slacker, and noticeably rusty.

"Hold on!" Kiki smiles again as she grabs her seat.

I grip the seat and clench my jaw, ready for lift-off. But the pod just slowly starts off the ground, creeping up the cable.

I realize she is laughing.

"Pretty prince-y, Downers don't go up in the fast pods."

I blush, embarrassed for not knowing that, but also embarrassed because it is the first time Kiki has called me "pretty." I might be in the midst of a crush.

"Settle in. It will be three hours before we get to Upper Tampa."

As the pod ascends and gains velocity, I get a view of the launchpad and then all of the islands that make up South Florida and then the Gulf and the Caribbean, and then the whole American South. I am appreciating the slower pace. I never get tired of the view down while going up.

---

After about fifteen minutes Kiki breaks the silence.

"What's a Riser like you doing slumming with the Downers?"

I explain how my father cut me off a week after my mother died. I can remember exactly where I was when I got the video message. I was in the library at school in Upper Miami, studying Earth's history. The book was describing the time period when there were still polar ice caps and glaciers and people would drive around in motorized vehicles powered by petroleum. I was taking notes for a paper I had to write.

My father's message was short. He said "I'm getting married again and there won't be money to support you anymore. Get a job."

That was two months ago. My school kicked me out the next day, and I lived with a friend for a few weeks, but they did not have enough food credits to cover me and I decided to do what my father said and get a job. I went down to Lower Miami and started looking for a job. Without a degree, there weren't any Riser jobs available, that's how I ended up in Lower Tampa taking a Downer job.

"So that's why I'm here training your sorry backside. Tell me more about that history you were learning. What is a glacier? We got some time." Kiki looks genuinely curious. Downers can get an education in the trades, but there isn't much of an effort to teach them more than that.

I tell her that before the Uppers moved into space, they lived on Earth. They kept the Downers and the Risers in constant financial distress, even as their lifestyle made the planet more and more unliveable. There used to be huge sheets of ice, high in the mountains and in Greenland and the North and South Poles. The temperatures got so warm that all the ice on the planet melted. Florida went under water except for the cities that built sea walls and became islands. The warming planet made life hell for people on the surface, including the Uppers.

"Snarfing Uppers! Blitzing up everything, everywhere, all the time." Kiki says. All Downers know intimately the dangers of surface life.

I tell her that when the first cable elevators made living in space a reality, the Uppers quickly fled the planet. In space, they didn't have to worry about hurricanes, heat waves, floods, or wildfires. Also in space, angry mobs of hungry Downers couldn't reach them.

"Ha." Kiki snorts.

I continue to talk about how most Uppers moved to live full-time in the stations, only coming down to vacation when the weather and security situation permitted. Risers, like my family, were left trying to manage the planet and keep the Uppers happy and supplied. We were given certain perks, like vacations on the stations and access to better housing, food, security, and education.

Downer life has always been hard, but it became locked in to near unbearable when the Uppers moved up. All this happened over a hundred years ago, I tell her.

"You saying that Downer life is hard? You don't have to tell me. They don't care a rat's ass about us." Kiki looks at me, dead serious. "But they have no idea what is coming."

I think about her tattoos. I wonder how connected she might be with organized resistance. I know my father at one time was in charge of a Riser division that tracked resistance movements in the South Florida Islands. He would be almost happy on the days when his team took out a resistance cell.

---

It has been cold for a while and I appreciate Kiki's blanket over the both of us. I have a strong urge to try to hold her hand under the blanket, but I know she would just laugh at me or worse. Besides, I don't want to piss her off. She is the only Downer who has been nice to me so far.

We can see other cables on either side, taking pods like ours up or down, to and from Upper Tampa. The planet below is looking like a blue blob with clouds and storms receding as we close in on our destination. The station looms ahead of us, sprawling out and covered with lights and dangling cables everywhere.

---

I have never been to this part of a station. Everything is dirtier and darker than on the Upper side. As the pod enters the bay, Kiki pulls in the remote and detaches us from the cable. She fires the jets and we join the queue of pods waiting to be processed into the station.

"Welcome back, Kiki!" a cheery male voice sounds through our pod speakers. "Who is your second today?"

"Yo, Jams! Good to hear your voice! This is Andrew, a little princeling, a Riser who got kicked out of his prissy school."

"Is he ready to work?"

"I don't think any of us are ever ready to work. But we do it. I'm sure he will too." I feel a little sense of pride in Kiki's assessment.

"Can he keep his mouth shut?"

Kiki looks at me. "He will have to," she says.

She turns off our mic and says to me, "It is time for you to forget any love you might have had for Uppers. You're a Downer now and we need to count on each other. Your first day will be hard because you are Riser spawn and most Downers hate Risers more than Uppers. They may test you. Stick close to me and I won't let anybody hurt you. I like you and I also think you might be useful to the cause."

Kiki docks the pod and we start to unbuckle the straps. This part of the station doesn't have artificial gravity and I float off my seat, grabbing my pack with one hand and reaching for a handhold with the other as Kiki opens the door. The air feels stale and my eyes adjust to the dim flickering light. We are floating in a big room with about a dozen other disembarking Downers, all in uniform. Kiki points and I see a doorway with a bright light beyond. We follow the handholds to the decontamination chamber.

This time a whole group us of gets naked together. I have to get over any self-consciousness I have. Everyone has tattoos except me. Kiki turns to me and says "you need some snarfing ink, pretty prince." I decide that I'd follow her anywhere.

---

It is harder to put on my kit in zero G, but I manage. I notice the other Downers in the group deferring to Kiki and calling her "boss Kiki." She gives some instructions to one of them, who scuttles down a tube, propellng herself using handholds. Kiki turns to me and says "this way."

We go down another tube and I struggle to keep up. This tube is smaller than any tube I've ever been in and I start to feel closed in. At last she stops in front of a doorway, which opens after she waves her card in front of a panel. Inside the small room I find myself feeling the weight of my body again. We are transitioning to the artificial gravity section of the station.

"There is someone you need to meet." Kiki says as we step through the sliding door into a crowded low-ceiling kitchen space. It is loud and hot, there is steam everywhere, and people are walking fast in all directions. Meals are being packed in canisters and snapped into vaccuum tubes, which carry them away. Other tubes are dumping canisters down into the cleaning area.

I feel a moment of shame, knowing that I have eaten countless meals from identical canisters in Upper Miami and never once considered where they came from or where they went.

Kiki walks through the chaos and people step aside as she moves. I follow in her wake. We get to the end of the room and Kiki waves her card in front of a dirty panel and a door opens into a dingy office. There are framed photos and certificates covering the walls. Behind a desk sits an older woman with tight dreadlocks, round eyeglasses, and smile lines on her face. I can see the edge of a tattoo peeking out from underneath her sleeve. She looks up at Kiki.

"Ma. I got some fresh meat for you."

The woman laughs and looks me over "You call me 'ma' too, young man. If Kiki vouches for you, then you can make yourself useful here. Go find a locker for your gear."

"Kiki, get him an apron and start him at the bottom."

"Thanks, Ma," Kiki nods.

---

Kiki and I walk to the next door over and enter a tight room filled with rusty lockers and a line of benches down the middle. She opens a locker and stuffs her gear inside while pulling out an apron and putting it on. She points to another one that doesn't have a lock and says "try that one."

I open it and the smell of rotten food assaults my nose. Kiki grabs a garbage can and wipes the rot into it. She reaches into a locker and produces a spray bottle and a rag and gives my locker a once over.

"Snarfin' Jojo. Leaving offal in his snarfing locker." I notice her voice catch a little when she says "Jojo." I will remember to ask her later about him. After my gear is stashed, Kiki hands me an apron as we walk out into the bustling kitchen. She points at the growing pile of dirty canisters. "Wash."

Six hours later my fingers look like prunes and I can barely stand up.

Kiki comes back and looks at me: "quitting time, prince-y." She takes off her apron and walks to the locker room, again parting the sea of people as she goes. I follow, glad to be done for the day. At least I think it is day. This part of the station doesn't have any windows.

"Let me show you where to sleep. Ink will have to wait. You look dead."

I follow Kiki down a narrow hall until she stops at a door and presses a button. Inside there are rows of hammocks, some occupied, some not. She points to a bottom hammock and looks at the foot locker underneath.

"I'm going to let you in on a secret. We recruited you special. We need someone like you for our plan. It is time for the Uppers to get what's coming to them, and you are going to be our little prince. Think on that history boy. You did well today. Get some rest. Your next shift starts at oh six hundred. I'll come get you."

Kiki leans in and kisses me on the cheek before she turns to leave. I'm left with her scent on me and a thousand questions.